'Beach Colors' set in fictional Conn. beach resort

Joe Meyers

Published 5:46 pm, Thursday, June 28, 2012

When she was a dancer in New York City, Shelley Noble spent many weekends on the Connecticut shoreline. She has used that period in her life as inspiration for the new novel, "Beach Colors."
Photo: Contributed Photo

When she was a dancer in New York City, Shelley Noble spent many...

"Beach Colors" is set in the fictional Connecticut beach town of Crescent Cove which author Shelley Noble says is an amalgam of towns like Old Lyme and Guilford.
Photo: Contributed Photo

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Anyone who has had a lifelong relationship with a favorite resort town will probably relate to "Beach Colors" (William Morrow, $14.99), the new novel by Shelley Noble.

The book follows 40ish fashion designer Margaux Sullivan who loses her life in the fast lane of Manhattan after her crooked financier husband cleans out her bank accounts and disappears.

Margaux has her business and her New York City apartment taken away from her by creditors and has nowhere to go but the Connecticut beach town where she spent all the summers of her youth and where her widowed mother has kept a small weather-beaten cottage.

"There is something about a beach -- even if it's not your hometown -- that can wipe away your troubles and suggest infinite possibilities," Noble said in a phone interview from her New Jersey home last week.

"I think half of it is subconscious," the novelist said of the way beach vacations can mellow us out.

"There's a sense of being able to stop that gerbil on the treadmill," she added of sitting on a beach, pondering the past and the future, as all of it is put into perspective by the vastness of the sea.

Many of us don't mind if the rest of the world changes as long as our beach retreat remains frozen in time.

"Going to the beach can produce a little anger, too, when that familiar clam shack is now a high rise, with condos you could never afford," the writer added.

The fictional Crescent Cove is an amalgam of the Connecticut coastal towns that Noble used to visit when she was a dancer in New York City.

"I have been going for a long time," Noble said of the Connecticut shore. "I still have good friends there. When I was living in Manhattan, working in several different dance companies, it was my weekend place."

The town in "Beach Colors" is somewhere in the neighborhood of Old Lyme, Saybrook and Guilford, but a bit further from the highway, middle- rather than upper-class, and just a bit rundown.

The novel gets into the sometimes prickly relationship between those who are born and reared in a resort area and those who just escape to it in the summer.

After Margaux returns to Crescent Cove to take stock of her life -- and to plot a return to the fashion world -- she falls into a relationship with the town's temporary police chief Nick Prescott.

Margaux doesn't realize that Nick had a crush on her when she was a young girl, but now sees her as an unattainable "outsider."

There is an immediate physical attraction between the two seemingly mismatched people, but Noble keeps us guessing right up to the final chapters about whether or not Nick and Margaux might have a future together.

Noble has created romance and mystery novels, but says she enjoyed this foray into "women's fiction."

"I have written romance, where it is all about the love story. Women's fiction is designed to consider the whole person -- it's not about some guy riding in on a white horse. (Margaux) has a mother, friends and like many other women has to decide between a career and a family," Noble said.

The publisher is so pleased by the book that Noble is at work on more than one follow-up novella.

Hull writes of the band's strong festival response from a 45-minute set and seeming imminent national acclaim via the annual live recordings issued by Verve Records.

"But a strange thing happened. The entire four days of recordings were found to have a serious tape defect and could not be released, the only time in Newport's history that this has occurred," Hull wrote in an email.

Forty-two years later, the Jazz Giant's tape recording was found in the Archives of the Library of Congress and presented to Hull.